Behind the Façades in France: What expats and the mainstream media (French and American alike) fail to notice (or fail to tell you) about French attitudes, principles, values, and official positions…

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Is Apple Losing It? With the Relinquishment of iPhoto, It Sure Seems to Be the Case

One of the worst "innovations" over the past years
was the decision to "improve" the Mac computer's iPhoto
feature,
I wrote on Instapundit in response to Don Norman and
Bruce Tognazzini's How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name,
indeed to have it replaced by an app called,
simply, Photos (to coincide with the iPhone's Photos
app, which actually had that straight-forward name
because it was/is really little more a simple straight-forward
description of results of the in-built camera).

iPhoto was already as near perfection as can be, and
making it "better" got rid of some of its best features.

• You used to be able to write captions for a batch of
photos at a time, from 2 photos to 20 to 200, if need be;
this feature is gone, and now you have (if indeed you have
the courage to go ahead with such onerous a task) to write
(or copy and paste) every caption one photo at a time.

• The above-mentioned caption used to be immediately
visible when you clicked on the photo, and appear right
next to it, along with the technical information on the
photo (lighting, lens aperture, etc…) and the (GPS) place
where it was taken;
now it is only visible when and if you press the
information command (CMD + I) and it appears in a
separate window, one that hovers over and therefore
sometimes hides part of the photo. (Nothing drastic,
I know, but, again, still something that hardly needed
"improvement" in the first place.)

• Apple used to have an iPhoto feature called Events, which
allowed people to put photos related to a certain (wait for
it)… event into the same file. Gone (in order to make the
Mac computer compatible with the iPhone's photo app,
something that hardly seemed called for or necessary).
Events seems to be replaced by a feature that most of
us have no use whatsoever for, the ability to file photos
by days, weeks, months, and years.

(If you go on a trip from the middle of one week to the middle of the
next, for business or pleasure, you hardly want that vacation or business
trip in two files, along with photos in each from your home town before
and after the trip; you want them together, with the home photos in two
(before and after) separate files (or, if you so wish, in one separate file).)

So what Apple has done is get rid of options.

But the greatest option that Apple got rid of was iPhotos itself.
Once you have upgraded to the first non-Feline operating system (OS),
i.e., to the first California landmark (as I learned to my great displeasure
when I upgraded from Mountain Lion to Mavericks),
the option to use iPhoto vanishes. If a user likes Photos, fine.
But why should he not be able to retain iPhotos if he prefers that?!
In other words, why can't, why couldn't, Apple retain both?!